Sign Letter

The following letter will be sent to a number of Catholic and mainstream newspapers in Ireland on the date of the anniversary of Humanae Vitae (25th July):

[TO BE A CO-SIGNATORY PLEASE JUST ADD YOUR NAME – no need for anything else – IN THE COMMENT BOX BELOW (where it says “Leave a Reply”). WE INVITE YOU TO SIGN THE LETTER IF YOU ARE A YOUNG, LAY, CATHOLIC NOW LIVING IN IRELAND. Afterwards, please check out the details of the Humanae Vitae Conference – in Dublin on Aug 4th – on the Homepage of this website.]

“On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the publication of Humanae Vitae, the Catholic Church’s encyclical on human sexual love, we young lay people, living in Ireland, wish to express our support of that document. The encyclical affirms the goodness of sexual love between a husband and wife, a goodness that integrates both chaste love and openness to new life, and explains in clear terms why the use of artificial contraception is a violation of that goodness.

As young lay Catholics today, we see in the teaching of Humanae Vitae something of a prophecy. It heralded exactly what we see today. In frustrating the procreative element of sex, many sexual relationships of a transitory, exploitative and even abusive nature have emerged, where sex is treated as something recreational, commitment-free and persons, particularly women, are treated as objects. In Western civilization, family sizes have dwindled to sizes far lower than those of less affluent times and the contraceptive mentality drives the demand for abortion.

We see in this teaching, the authoritative voice of Christ and an application of the Gospel values to the life-giving and sanctifying integrity of marriage. If marriage serves as the metaphor for the relationship between Christ and His Church – the Christian sacrament of marriage is supposed to manifest and realise this relationship in our lives – it is unthinkable that artificial contraception would play a part in that. As Jesus says in the Gospel of St. John (10:10) “I came that they might have life and have it in abundance”.

This document is all the more remarkable given that it ran completely counter to the public zeitgeist of the time it was written, so prophetic of the consequences and so clear about the pathway back to the culture of life. It’s the same Spirit of Truth we need now to bring His Beauty and Goodness to our thinking about life for the sake of the future of our human family.